Breakfast cereals remain a popular food item. Though often eaten as the first meal of the day, breakfast cereals can be enjoyed throughout the day. People can eat breakfast cereal in lieu of a traditional meal or as a between-meal or an after-meal snack. Many a restless sleeper has partaken in the ritual of the late-night bowl of cereal.
Breakfast cereals are typically made from processed grains. They can be eaten hot or cold and are frequently mixed with another food item, such as milk, yogurt and/or fruit. Among the most popular ways to eat breakfast cereal is to mix it with milk. Mixing cereal with milk offers a number of benefits to the consumer, such as improved taste, better texture, additional vitamins and nutrients, hydration and overall enhanced satisfaction.
For many, however, adding milk produces an undesirable side effect—soggy cereal. As consumers of breakfast cereal know well, breakfast cereal begins absorbing milk as soon as the milk is added. As a result, breakfast cereal that has remained immersed in milk for long periods becomes soggy, or mushy.
Consumers have developed various techniques for avoiding the scourge that is soggy breakfast cereal. For example, breakfast cereal lying at or near the bottom of the cereal bowl can be eaten first. Alternatively, milk can be added incrementally to a bowl of cereal as the milk is consumed. Yet another technique is to dispense small portions of breakfast cereal into a bowl. In addition to being a nuisance, however, these techniques may be ineffectual in preventing soggy breakfast cereal.
As a result, specialized cereal bowls have been developed that segregate dry breakfast cereal from milk. Such cereal bowls may contain separate basins or include a partition. A drawback to these designs, however, is that they impede the ability of a consumer to easily combine the breakfast cereal with the milk using a kitchen utensil such as a spoon. A further drawback of these designs is that they impede the stackability of multiple bowls for storage purposes.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved cereal bowl that addresses the aforementioned drawbacks. Specifically, there is a need for a cereal bowl that segregates dry breakfast cereal from milk without adversely interfering with the ability of a consumer to create a mixture of these components with a spoon. There is a further need to be able to stack multiple cereal bowls for storage purposes.